Modern conferencing systems facilitate communications among multiple participants over telephone lines, Internet protocol (IP) networks, and other data networks. In a typical conferencing session, a participant enters the conference by using an access number. During the conference a mixer receives audio and/or video streams from the participants, determines the N loudest speakers, mixes the audio streams from the loudest speakers and sends the mixed media back to the participants. Conferencing systems are often impacted by participants that are not actively involved in the conference session. For instance, conference session participants may locally place a call on hold, which, in turn, impacts the overall conference session and conferencing system. In other cases, a participant may subject other participants to various types of background noise, and in particular, “on hold” music that can be inadvertently broadcast into conference call when a participant places their phone on hold while connected to a conference. In some cases, the participant is not listening to the conference call while this is happening and is completely unaware that they are generating an annoyance.
Certain conferencing systems, such as Cisco's Unified MeetingPlace™, provide meeting management functions whereby users can mute and unmute themselves. Additionally, users with the appropriate authorization level can mute all of the other attendees, to hold a sidebar conference, for instance. However, a non-active conference session participant can still directly impact the entire conferencing system, due to the fact that most conferencing systems continue to dedicate resources to the non-active participant's session. This is a serious problem given that conference management platforms typically have a limited number of lines with associated direct costs. Inactive lines used by non-active participants draw directly from system resources and can generate unnecessary financial cost increases.